An Examination of the Adoption and Frequency of Part-Day and Full-Day Telework and the Impacts on Weekly Commute VMT

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally reshaped work arrangements, creating long-term implications for transportation system performance, infrastructure planning, and demand management policy. While telework has received considerable attention, most existing research treats telework as a binary outcome, assuming that workers either commute to a workplace or remain at home for an entire day. This assumption does not reflect current behavior. A growing share of workers now engage in hybrid arrangements that include part-day telework, in which work is split between in-person and remote locations within a single day. This form of telework introduces additional flexibility in work scheduling and travel timing that is not represented in current transportation data systems or forecasting tools. The distinction between part-day and full-day telework is important for transportation system performance. Full-day telework eliminates commute trips for a given day and directly reduces travel demand. In contrast, part-day telework typically retains commute travel but has the potential to shift its timing, redistribute trips across the day, and alter the temporal structure of travel demand. These effects are directly relevant to peak-period congestion, network reliability, and system efficiency. Despite these implications, major national data systems, including the American Community Survey and the National Household Travel Survey, do not adequately capture part-day telework behavior. As a result, current travel demand models may misrepresent both the level and timing of travel demand under hybrid work conditions, limiting their usefulness for evaluating transportation policies. Motivated by the need to improve the behavioral realism and policy relevance of travel demand modeling in a post-pandemic environment, this study will examine the adoption and frequency of part-day and full-day telework using multi-day travel diary data from the 2023 Puget Sound Regional Household Travel Survey. These data provide detailed information on daily work location choices and activity participation over multiple days, enabling analysis of weekly travel patterns. The project will also establish defensible criteria for identifying part-day telework, addressing a key measurement issue that affects both survey design and model specification. The project will develop a joint econometric modeling framework that represents telework adoption, the number of part-day telework days, the number of full-day telework days, and commute distance. This joint structure is necessary to capture unobserved behavioral factors that simultaneously influence work arrangement choices and travel behavior, including preferences for flexibility, occupational constraints, and built environment characteristics. By explicitly modeling these interdependencies, the project will provide a more accurate representation of how work arrangements influence both the magnitude and timing of travel demand. In this regard, a central contribution of the project will be the translation of daily work location decisions into weekly commute vehicle miles of travel (VMT). By focusing on weekly activity-travel patterns, the project produces outputs that are directly relevant for evaluating congestion, system utilization, and the effectiveness of demand management strategies. The project will also examine variation in

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $75,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3552344815

  69A3552348320

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  University of Texas at Austin

  Austin, TX  United States  78712
• Performing Organizations:

  University of Texas at Austin

  Austin, TX  United States  78712
• Principal Investigators:

  Bhat, Chandra

• Start Date: 20260601
• Expected Completion Date: 20270531
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Commuting; Econometric models; Flexible hours; Periods of the day; Telecommuting; Travel demand; Travel patterns; Vehicle miles of travel
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 02002870
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Center for Understanding Future of Travel Behavior and Demand
• Contract Numbers: 69A3552344815, 69A3552348320
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Sep 18 2026 10:27AM